Graphic & Web design blog

How to download Youtube videos to your computer

Video streaming was the great invention that made online videos very popular, thanks to a rapidly growing infrastructure. Before that, you had to download the entire video before being able to see it. Now online videos are a huge part of the media market, and they may well become the main one in a new future (if they aren’t already, I didn’t check).

This said, sometimes you need to download videos from these platforms. Obviously, I’m not suggesting to do this for illegal reasons, but for practical ones. For example, you may need to download a bigger video if you have a flaky internet connection (or will when on the road).

You may also want to download Youtube videos when your friends send you private Youtube videos and you want to keep them. It even happened to me on the professional side, when a video editing agency sent us all the videos we order through their Youtube page. Of course, we could have requested that they sent us the source files directly, but it was much quicker to go through an online video platform.

So… how do you download Youtube videos?

1. The complicated way

If you are familiar with the command-line, you can use the youtube-dl command line to download videos very easily. It’s open source and allows you to download videos from popular video platforms and use them on your computer.

Another complicated way to download Youtube videos programmatically is to use a PHP class that provides you with an interface to download the videos. One of these classes is yt_downloader, you can find it on Github.

2. The easy way

If you are just looking for the videos, and not to learn how to do it all by yourself, you should check out an online service like Youtube Video Downloader. This web app is probably the best way to download videos and turn them into anything you want. You can use it by going to this URL: www.freemake.com/free_video_downloader

About the Author

Mirko Humbert

Designer Daily is a place for designers to find inspiration, resources, and thoughts that will be useful to their daily work. It is maintained by Mirko Humbert, a Swiss graphic and web designer. More info.